Embankment (Sze No. 3)

Sze No. 3

As the express train comes round the Jolimont tunnel and out onto the magnificent nineteenth century embankment that extends a mile and more from Richmond north to Clifton Hill, inner Melbourne is seen shining through the rain, standing bright against the darkness of night, squares and filaments of light.

Through the windows can be seen the walls of lit windows that constitute the appearance afar of the lost dreams of twentieth century architects, keen to construct buildings of thirty and forty storeys they had learnt about in architecture school, the wall cladding gone grungy and replaced by new luminescent cladding.

Over to the left glare the rings and batteries of highpower lights above the greatest football ground in the Antipodes, for a game is in progress and the glow of the ground in the dark afar is a sign that roaring and cheering will go on for some time, and the results will be unimportant.

Richmond, with its bends of little lights and highrise glitter, comes to view and with it the tangle of unpolled trees, the broken down walls of ephemeral graffiti, and below them the trash along the backlanes, the cars that were picked up and dumped down again in vacant lots, windows fractured.

The carriage itself is a Sarah Sze, old MX newspapers strewn in order across seats, a can of something rolls across the floor, and an empty packet of headache caplets has been lain carefully with a mineral water bottle packet against the soft seat upholstery, an abstract design of colourful oblongs, zigzags and streak lines.

The embankment is built of consolidated earth, but who knows what else down there below the tracks, bricks, crockery, boulders, whatever was solid enough to be ground into ground, rests there now, and then bluestone chips hold the sleepers in place above ground, and the steel rails riveted by nails thicker than thumbs.

Skyline of supermarket packets topshelf in the dark, streets lined with boxes of fertile imagination down there in the shadows, a townhall clock that hasn’t told the right time for years, a police station cordoned off with plastic orange tape like it were a crime scene but is in fact (only) a workmen’s site, impinge on the solid fragility of the retina.

Streetlights with their cones of glow, amidst tree branches bare, and the wires upon wires linking and lifting and drifting from one pole to the next and into recesses toward the river, or up the air toward the heavy-housed slopes of old Fitzroy in the dark.

Impossible sometimes not to notice how all of the buildings serve the coated bodies going past, buildings for travel, buildings for rest, buildings of drugs, buildings of food, buildings made for analysis, buildings made for reverence, and so forth for the bodies at ease in the carriages warm and mobile, express speeding along the embankment.

Dark outlines of the hills of Kew are invisible in the rain and closer, halogen lights grip the park paths and feature the speeding raindrops, while hands rummage inside through a brand carrybag for a biro, a book, a packet of throat lozenges, and meanwhile reflections of lights and shapes change in the spacious windows.

Except even if the train were to stop the movements continue, even when the traffic comes to a red light in Hoddle Street other traffic is turning with the green arrow, or reversing to park, or idling behind the bus, and as the train goes over the iron bridge not stopping for the thousandth time, it’s that time of the week again.

Inevitably, as they say, half-lit gravel yards are empty in the drizzle so that, now gates are closed, working machinery cannot be differentiated from obsolete machinery, and great funnels and conveyor belts, if they are conveyor belts in fact, lose their hardness.

The freeway too goes under us, a pattern of permanent need as cars their red lights their dark interiors maintain perfect straight lines and perfect veers both ways, forever it seems, and no one knows when it will end or what will happen when it ends, not even the wealthy designers of those shiny wet machines.

Past the foursquare heritage warehouse of Victoriana, its shelves of wrought iron objects and porcelain doorknobs and encaustic tiles all quiet now that the lights are out and everyone’s gone home, thence up Clifton Hill past the yards of timber fragrant in the rain, and the Darling Gardens, speckled with litter of different sizes.